Sunday (1994)
Words and Photographs by Willow Shields
What should you expect from a Sunday (1994) show? To be moved, and moved, and moved. Combining the darkness of feminine morbidity and pop-y guitars, this trio* made of Paige Turner (vocals) and Lee Newell (guitar, production, ect.) might just be the band you’ve been craving all this time.
I stood outside of Green Door Store not knowing what lay ahead of me, smoking a cigarette and shivering from a combination of the cold and the anxiety of a sheep going into slaughter. As I looked up, a group passed me on the road past the gazebo, hazy through the plastic windows, looking like some dark suit-clad spectres. I would later find out that those were the members of the band I would spend the next hour and a half falling in love with. After venturing inside I found warmth, a full bar area and the sink of shame (a minuscule sink in the middle of the Green Door bar where you must fill a tiny cup, from a tiny tap, if you want water and don't want to drink alcohol like a ‘normal person’). I also found a strange feeling I’ve rarely felt at Green Door Store, that none of it fit, more on that later**. The show room was packed, and getting warmer. The night had only just begun. The pre-show playlist was perfect, lots of Fontains D.C, The Smiths and Lana Del Rey. The lights shut off, and the Twin Peaks intro music started to play over the gigantic speakers flanking the stage. The band took their places in the dark, soundtracked to cheers and claps from the crowd. The white strobes on-stage began to flash and from the curtained ‘backstage’ emerged vocalist Paige Turner, to even louder screams. Wearing a white vintage lace dress paired with Doc Marten shoes, she glided onto the cramped stage and it dawned on me that she is everything I wanted to be as a teenager.
As the band settled onto stage, I was transfixed. I thought to myself that I had never before seen a band that fit on Green Door Store’s stage less than Sunday(1994). At that moment, physically. With the drum kit set-up leaving maybe half a meter in front of it for Turner to perform. Like a true professional, she only bumped into a couple of things a couple of times. On a more metaphysical scale though, they didn't fit either. They belong on gigantic stages where they all have a few meters of buffer between each other and 30,000 in front of them. And as I looked across the crowd at Green Door Store, my pessimism towards the Brighton music scene reached a peak. Picture it, you have the band of a generation in front of you giving their all, and all they have to look at is a room of unmoving, apathetic faces staring up at them. About five songs into their set, Turner began to feel the same. “Brighton I need a lot more from you,” and at the drop of that song she expelled, “Brighton, what the fuck!” This is a phenomenon experienced across the entirety of this city’s music scene. A band deserving of the whole world, faced with a crowd totally undeserving of them. Guitarist Lee Newell renewed Turner’s sentiments “Brighton, you’re going to need to lap for longer than that,” and when the proper applause occurred, Newell joked in a Frankenstein-ien tone, "they're alive!” Of course, there were a few girls dotted around the crowd who were making up for the bored-looking middle aged men dominating the first few rows. To the girls directly in front of me dressed to the nines and singing along to every lyric, you had a part in saving this show for me. All my love, a totally jaded Brighton-based music writer.
As the band near the end of their set, Turner takes a break to remark on the quirky nature of the venue, “I’m still warming up…There’s no dressing room here so we had to sit… in the outside. So when we got on stage, we were still defrosting,” she then passed over to guitarist Lee Newell “who loves to talk”. He introduced the band and then genuinely thanked everyone for coming, and humorously called his own speech ‘humility and bullshit’ as they began to play again. As their set came to an end, Turner thanked the room again, and said “We’re pinching ourselves every day” for the experiences they've had since releasing their first track in February last year.
As they played the penultimate song to close their show, ‘Blossom’. Tears began to fill my eyes. They are truly a band of a generation, and a must-see live act. They manage to blend melancholic humour with some hopefulness. They are my new favourite band. As I walked into the cold again, I knew that I had been touched by something otherworldly and would feel it for the rest of my earthly dwelling.